A China-watcher since he grew up there as the son of missionaries and
attended the University of Nanking, Mr. Thomson sees signs of a new
approach in our relations with Communist China. THE UNITED STATES AND
CHINA IN WORLD AFFAIRS, a series of studies undertaken by the Council on
Foreign Relations, provides the basis, he says, for a mature Far Eastern
policy. Mr. Thomson, who now teaches history at Harvard, writes out of a
background of experience in the White House and the Department of State
during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

by James C. Thomson

IN early January, 1962, the snap and crackle of thawing intellects was
almost audible in the Secretary's conference room on the seventh floor of
the State Department. The occasion was a "policy-planning" meeting, the
focus a weighty paper on the Sino-Soviet split. As the discussion
progressed, one high official after another grasped and articulated the
new reality (some for the first time): that "the Bloc" was no longer a
bloc, and that the world would never be quite the same again.

Not for the first time, State's consensus had come late. The new reality
was already old hat to many outside the government. But State's discovery
raised a flood of internal questions. How to deal with bipolar
adversaries? How to approach fractured Communist parties in third
countries? Should we try to manipulate the split or lie low? And of
central importance, what to do about mainland China?

Some there were who used the new perception to argue (yet again) for a new
approach to China. The time was now ripe, they felt, to pursue a multiple
strategy: containment, yes, but no longer isolation. Surely it was time
for us to move from posture to policy--to end the travel ban, as a first
step, to press for "contacts"; at the very least, we should shift the onus
for Peking's isolation to Peking (or, in the then current jargon, "get the
monkey off our back").

The Secretary of State thought otherwise. Why not encourage, he mused, a
series of studies of the China problem in all its ramifications, to be
undertaken on the outside? By something solid like the Council on
Foreign-Relations, perhaps under a private foundation grant?

To those who sought action, the proposal, however unassailable, had the
earmarks of evasion. Published studies would take three years at the
least. Why wait? What more did we need to know? A. Doak Barnett had
already explored the ground fully in 1960 with his Council on Foreign
Relations study, Communist China and Asia: Challenge to American Policy,
not to mention the reams of internal papers on the subject.

Mr. Rusk prevailed, of course. And the Establishment responded
gracefully.

The result is now, in part, at hand: six solid volumes in a series on The
United States and China in World Affairs, one of which appeared in late
1965, four in 1966, and one in May of this year. There are five more to
come--on "Asian security and American policy, U.S. negotiations with the
Chinese Communists, Taiwan and the Nationalist government, Communist
China's foreign policy, and the political development of Communist China."
So, in late 1967, the 1962 project is at midstream in terms of output.
Time, surely, to make a preliminary judgment.

The judgment is not hard to make: the first six books are a uniformly
first-rate contribution to public education on the China problem. The
Council has done well in its choice of authors. Most of the credit must go
to the project's original editor, the gifted Robert Blum, former president
of the Asia Foundation, who died in 1965 before any of these books were
published and was succeeded by MIT's Lucian W. Pye. Blum is the author of
the incisive pivotal study which bears the series' title, a book which
Doak Barnett has brought to posthumous completion.

To be specific, political analyst A. M. Halpern has skillfully edited
sixteen essays on how other nations view China, thereby placing the
Sino-American relationship in its proper global perspective. Economist
Alexander Eckstein follows with a highly readable analysis of China's
economy, and in particular, its foreign economic relations. Veteran Far
East correspondent A. T. Steele then offers a probe in depth of American
attitudes toward China, both traditional and recent, and of American
knowledge (and, most dramatically. American ignorance) on China. Historian
Lea Williams gives a useful and encouraging account of the 13 million
Chinese beyond both Chinas--the overseas communities in Southeast Asia.
And retired Marine General Samuel Griffith provides a masterful, absorbing
history of that vital instrument of Chinese power the People's Liberation
Army.

Together with Robert Blum, these authors are as knowledgeable and literate
a group of scholars as one could hope to find on their respective facets
of the China problem. And each book is what one should expect: a gold mine
of information and analysis, well assembled, readable, and, implicitly or
explicitly, with a clear line of argument. Furthermore, McGraw-Hill has
wisely made the knowledge and the argument available to a wider public
through simultaneous paperback release.

What is the line of argument? To the surprise of very few who have looked
closely at America and China and how it all happened, the message is that
Communist China is here to stay, in one form or another; that it is
radically alien in tradition and outlook from most of the rest of the
world; that its pride and its poverty, in John Fairbank's phrase, make it
a very difficult neighbor for ALL of the rest of us; that the real issue
is not how to isolate it or smother it or make it go away, but how to ease
it into some sort of rational and mutually acceptable relationship with
the other three quarters of mankind.

These books, born of policy immobilisme in Washington, raise anew and
sharply the question of China policy. They also provoke reflections on
that curious and unique phenomenon of modern history, the Sino-American
relationship.

Historians keep telling us that we cannot understand the present without
understanding the past--and if we didn't believe them, they would have to
go out of business. But usually they are right. And on China their
injunction has special validity.

The shock wave that Communism's victory in China sent through Americans
eighteen years ago this autumn can be understood only in terms of history.
No other nation in Asia had been on the receiving end of so much American
goodwill, good works, and philanthropy. No other nation had been the focus
of more persistent and grandiose American illusions. From the late
eighteenth century onwards we had sent first traders, then our
missionaries--evangelists, doctors, educators, technical experts--and our
diplomats as well. An "Open Door" to China came to mean 400 million
potential customers, 400 million potential Christians-
our special receptacle for the outflow of our altruism, and our special
protectorate against the obvious greed of the European and Japanese
predators. We admired Chinese culture, liked the Chinese people, delighted
in Chinese food, and deplored China's patent incapacity for effective
self-government. China made us generally feel good: it fed our sense of
benevolence and moral superiority. Our emotional investment in China was
uniquely high, far out of line with our strategic or economic stakes.

No wonder, then, that it shocked us to "lose" China to an alien ideology
and a strong, hostile regime that bit our helping hand. No wonder that we
reacted with bitterness in a headhunt for the treacherous bureaucrats and
professors who had brought on this calamity--and in so doing discarded or
maimed a generation of our nation's most precious expertise.

Yet, as usual in history, there is at least one other side to the story:
the Chinese side. What to the West was the century of China's
opening--China's exposure to the benefits of Western civilization--was
something rather different to China. It was a century of national trauma:
of the collapse of a 2000-year system of values, social structure, and
political authority--the collapse of one of mankind's most durable
creations, the Confucian state--a collapse induced by Western guns and
ideas and institutions. Out with the state went its all-encompassing
ideology. In its place came the prolonged agony of a search for something
new to fill the vacuum, to regenerate the nation, and to repel the foreign
intruders.

From the 1890s onward, Americans in China certainly perceived the agony
and the flux. But few of them perceived the depth and consequences of
national humiliation. Few perceived the potential power of awakened
Chinese nationalism. Few understood the process of revolution in China.
And few were prepared for America's eventual identification as the Number
One Imperialist, the principal heir to a century of pent-up resentments.

It would be naive to say that Communism's victory in China was inevitable.
Other ideologies had at least a fighting chance. But certain components of
Marxism-Leninism did give it an advantage over its competitors. Communism offered
an explanation of China's past, a program of action for China's present,
and a blueprint for China's future. And most important, to those of us who
have to live in the same world with China, Communism prevailed.

So relations between China and America are in part a product of this
century of collision between China and the West. But they are also a
product of the special circumstances of the Chinese civil war.

Twenty-five years ago last December, Pearl Harbor brought the United
States into a sudden firm alliance with the embattled Chinese Nationalist
government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. But that Nationalist regime,
eroded by internal weaknesses and Japanese aggression, became in time a
faction, not a government, and in due course was overwhelmed by its
opponents. Yet unlike most defeated parties in civil wars, the
Nationalists retreated in 1949 to a defensible chunk of territory, the
island of Taiwan, separated from the mainland by a hundred miles of water.
We were confronted, then, with an unfinished civil war in which our
wartime ally was down but not out. Meanwhile, on the mainland, the
victorious Communists were showing marked hostility toward Americans,
whose nation had aided their Nationalist enemies.

Perhaps even then some accommodation might have been reached--there was
talk of de facto U.S. recognition of Peking in the winter of 1949-1950.
But with the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, and with
the Chinese Communist intervention later that year (once American forces
moved north toward the Chinese frontier), hostility between Washington and
Peking was embedded in concrete for years to come. Truman interposed the
Seventh Fleet between the mainland and Taiwan, Eisenhower concluded a
military alliance with the Nationalists, threats to the offshore islands
were weathered--and America had intervened to freeze the unfinished civil
war. Such was the background to our China policy after 1951. The
components of that policy are familiar but worth citing:

First, nonrecognition of Communist China.

Second, opposition to Peking's membership in the United Nations.

Third, military containment of Communist China through a network of bases
and alliances.

Fourth, systematic isolation of Communist China through a total embargo on
trade, prohibition of travel by Americans, and vigorous persuasion of
others to follow our example.

And finally, military, economic, and political support for the Nationalist
government on Taiwan as the only legitimate claimant to China's place in
the world community.

Underlying that policy were a handful of sometimes conflicting
assumptions:

That Communist China was a Russian puppet or satellite--"a Slavic
Manchukuo," as Dean Rusk termed it in 1951.

That close containment and isolation would cause the weakening and
eventual collapse of the Peking regime.

That the Chinese people could not and would not tolerate Communism for
long.

And that a reinvigorated Chiang Kai-shek would someday lead his armies in
a victorious return to the mainland.

Despite both the policy and the assumptions, there were two significant
departures from rigidity during the 1950s. The first came as an outgrowth
of the Geneva and Bandung Conferences in 1954-1955. At the urging of third
parties, American and Chinese Communist diplomats began a series of
regular ambassadorial meetings, at Geneva and later at Warsaw. Some
progress was made on the agenda's first item, a mutual exchange of
detainees; but a deadlock and polemics ensued, and have characterized the
130-odd sessions in the twelve years since they began. Nonetheless, some
might argue that such regular ambassadorial talks constituted a form of de
facto recognition; at least we no longer claimed that Peking wasn't
there.

The second departure concerned a possible exchange of journalists between
mainland China and America. First proposed by the Chinese in 1956 at a
time of relative thaw, the exchange was rejected outright by Secretary
Dulles. By late 1957 pressures from the American journalistic community
forced Dulles to relent grudgingly; but by then the Chinese, shifting to
militancy and vexed at the United States, began to draw back from their
proposal. On the American side, however, 1957 was a small turning point:
from that time onward an increasing number of American journalists held
passports valid for travel to Communist China. Very few were admitted.
Edgar Snow got there from time to time, but as a "writer," not a
"journalist," a distinction important to Peking in its efforts to isolate
US.

So much for the twin legacy of our traditional relations with China and
our involvement in the Chinese civil war. And so much for the policy that
evolved out of this legacy.

How do you judge the success of a policy? One test: does it achieve its
objectives?

In one sense our China policy has achieved some of its objectives over
these seventeen years of containment and isolation. We still do not
recognize Communist China. China is still excluded from the United
Nations. We have built a fairly successful wall of military containment.
We still do not trade with the mainland. And Taiwan is apparently
friendly, stable, and a considerable success story in terms of economic
growth.

But on the other hand, Communist China has not collapsed. Peking has
somehow maintained effective control over 700 million people for almost
two decades, a feat of government probably unmatched in history. Nor is
Peking effectively isolated. Communist China is now recognized by
forty-nine nations and trades with many others, with the bulk of its trade
now shifted to the non-Communist West. And Peking has learned how to test
and develop nuclear weapons. All this despite the violent break with the
Soviet Union. There have been setbacks, of course; also internal
convulsions--most dramatic and mystifying, the "Great Proletarian cultural
Revolution." But for a "Slavic Manchukuo" this is really not so bad.

Furthermore, one must add that our China policy has been bought at a high
cost in terms of our relations with other nations. As Dr. Halpern's study
indicates, most of our major allies have never shared our assumptions
about Communist China. Most have been baffled and irritated by what they
regard as our irrationality and obsessiveness about China. Some have
broken with our policy. And many follow it only with restiveness and
misgivings.

Perhaps, then, a more pertinent question about our China policy is not
whether it has achieved its objectives, but whether its objectives are
still appropriate.

Here, in company with the late Mr. Blum and many others, I would strongly
argue the negative of the case. Putting aside the fascinating but futile
question of what we might or should have done a decade or two ago, I would
say that our China objectives of the fifties are largely irrelevant to the
present decade and the years that lie ahead.
Let me suggest an overall perspective: There are at least three
international problems of overriding significance that must command the
best energies and inventiveness of mankind in the remainder of this
century. One is the control of nuclear weapons. A second is the control of
population growth. And a third is the moderation of the Chinese Communist
revolution in its relations with other nations, and the assimilation of
Communist China into the world community.

The dangers of nuclear proliferation and the population explosion are
reasonably self-evident. An unmoderated and unassimilated China presents a
less dramatic but equally real threat to world peace: the threat of a
quarter of mankind, at the heart of Asian civilization, isolated,
excluded, poor, resentful, hostile, messianic, and at times, paranoid.

By moderation and assimilation I mean efforts to induce a gradual
lessening of China's antisocial behavior within the international order
and efforts designed to establish mutual confidence. This is a two-way
process that will require adjustments on both sides, including recognition
of China's legitimate national interests and great power status.

How to moderate--how to assimilate? Here our experience with the once
tightly closed societies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe should be
instructive. Two key words might be de-isolation and erosion--de-isolation
through increased exposure to the realities of the outside world, through
involvement in the economic, political, and cultural processes of the
outside world; and erosion, of rigidity, doctrine, and fear, through what
has been termed "the free flow of ideas, people, and goods."

It would be foolish to assume that the application of our European
experience to Communist China will achieve easy or quick success. All
historic analogies are inexact, and China is not Eastern Europe. At
best--an important caveat--American policy may only be marginal to the
outcome, for we are only one of a host of factors that will affect China's
future.

But I can see no acceptable alternative to a U.S. strategy toward China
that would have as its goal the moderation and assimilation of that
nation. To fail to develop such a strategy is to abdicate America's
responsibility as a great power.

What, ideally, should be the ingredients of this strategy?

A first element must still be modified containment: through the deterrence
of any real threat of Chinese aggression, and through economic and
military assistance to those nations on China's periphery that seek and
can use our aid--assistance tailored to their inevitably differing
needs.

I emphasize the term "real threat" because too often we have tended to
focus on China's bellicose WORDS to the exclusion of China's relatively
cautious DEEDS in the military sphere. We have focused on China's
pronouncements in the field of foreign affairs without understanding
China's overwhelming preoccupation with the problems of internal, domestic
affairs. On the pretext of containment, we have also indulged in
provocative military actions close to China's frontiers that serve no
useful military purpose and only increase Peking's paranoia. Such actions
are not a legitimate part of containment; containment's chief objective
should be to remove temptation.

But containment is only a shield or a posture. A successful strategy
requires more than that. What sort of things?

A second element should be unilateral action by the U.S. government to
remove all controls on the travel of Americans to Communist China, and
simultaneously, an expression of willingness to admit any Chinese visitors
permitted by Peking to come to America. Travel, human contact, and
cultural exchanges are essential to the lessening of ignorance and
distortion on both sides of the Pacific.

A third element should be similar unilateral action to end the embargo on
trade with China in nonstrategic goods. It is high time that we placed our
China trade on the same basis as our trade with other Communist nations.
History teaches that economic relations can do much to breach the barriers
of ideology and misunderstanding. As Professor Eckstein's study indicates,
our current trade controls only handicap American sellers in international
competition; they deny the Chinese nothing. Meanwhile, our apparent
distinction between good European Communists, who happen to be white, and
bad Asian Communists, who happen to be yellow, takes on dangerously racist
overtones. (A puzzling manifestation of this distinction is our continuing
failure to recognize Mongolia, the only Asian Communist state to sign the
test-ban treaty.)

A fourth element should be the encouragement of Peking's membership in the
United Nations (whether or not Peking actually "wants in") and all
international associations and conferences on a "dual representation"
basis which permits continuing membership to the Chinese Nationalist
government on Taiwan. We are told that both Chinas would find such an
arrangement unacceptable; but there is no reason for the UN's members to
permit their China policy to be manufactured in either Taipei or Peking.
Two claimants to the Chinese seat clearly exist; and the smaller of the
two, Taiwan, has a population that exceeds that of eighty-five other
member states. Until the two claimants can reach an accommodation, if
ever, both should be invited to take their seats.

Surely there could be no better training ground for Peking's rigid
parochial bureaucrats in the realities of world politics than the United
Nations. It is an ideal forum in which to learn "group play"--a forum in
which China's policies toward the United States, the Soviet Union, and the
Afro-Asian world would have to be orchestrated with a skill and subtlety
that can only be achieved by the muting of fanaticism. Nor is there a
better training ground for Chinese diplomats in the realities of American
life than residence in Manhattan.

A fifth and final element in such a strategy should be a persistent effort
to develop formal and informal mechanisms of bilateral governmental
contact between the United States and Communist China. The Warsaw
conversations are a good beginning; but they are not enough and have
developed a ritualistic sterility of their own (in a Polish palace, in
this age of electronic ingenuity, one must assume that each side is
speaking to a wider public). We should not fear to make private or public
proposals for higher level and more confidential conversations with the
Chinese on a host of unresolved issues. We should encourage third parties
in their efforts to bring us together.

Missing from this list is the old familiar question of diplomatic
recognition. Yet as long as Taiwan exists as an independent entity neither
Washington nor Peking will soon permit diplomatic relations. Informal de
facto recognition may already be a fact; but de jure recognition can best
come, in all probability, as a longer-term by
product of the other steps listed.

But what, one asks, would be the Chinese Communist response to such an
overall strategy of moderation and assimilation?

The answer is clear. For the time being, our initiatives would be rejected
out of hand and denounced as an imperialist plot. And even in the longer
run--assuming an end to the war in Vietnam--such initiatives might well
remain obstructed by the two paramount obstacles to a Washington-Peking
detente: the existence of Taiwan as a U.S. semiprotectorate; and China's
apparent need for a Public Enemy Number One in its internal and external
relations (a role in which Moscow begins to rival Washington).

So why attempt such a strategy?

The reasons relate to three audiences.

The first audience is extraneous to China. It is high time to correct a
deep-seated sense on the part of our allies, our friends and the neutrals
that America is somehow demented on the subject of Communist China. I
would hesitate to guess at the millions of dollars and thousands of
man-hours our government has poured into arm-twisting and persuasion in
its attempts to isolate Communist China since 1949. The toll has been far
more serious in terms of worldwide assessments of our judgment,
rationality, and maturity as a nation. This is a price we should no longer
pay. At the least we should shift the onus for Peking's isolation to
Peking.

Our second audience is the present leadership of Communist China and its
immediate successors. Whatever their differences on the future course of
the Chinese revolution, China's contending leaders still seem to agree
that we seek their downfall and will act to produce it. It is vital that
we take actions to demonstrate our true intentions: our willingness to
move toward a live-and-let-live arrangement with Peking. It is highly
doubtful that our actions will have any effect on Mao Tse-tung and his
Long March companions. But we should leave open to Mao's successors the
option of an honorable accommodation with America.

Our third audience is silent and barely visible: the doubters and
pragmatists. Within Chinese Communism--the technicians, scientists,
intellectuals, and lesser officials whose faith in the doctrinaire
rigidity of Maoism has been clearly shaken over the years. These are
elements whose existence and persistence seem to have given rise to Mao's
attempted purge through the Great Cultural Revolution. To this faceless
group in particular, and to its successors, we should send a clear and
unequivocal message, by our deeds as well as our words, that America wants
no eternal enmity with China. When we fail to send such a message--when we
live up to Mao Tse
tung's distorted image of us--we serve only the purposes of fanaticism and
hate.

Now, how well has our nation done in moving toward a strategy of
moderation and assimilation, of de-isolation and erosion in the past few
years?

As the Council on Foreign Relations' first volumes went to press, the
blunt answer was that we had barely moved at all.

With the election of John Kennedy in 1960, many students of the China
problem had hoped that the old rigidity in Washington would give way to
something more creative. But Kennedy, we are told, had resolved to
postpone major decisions on China until his second term; the mandate was
too fragile, the issue too hot. There WERE a few modifications of posture
during his Administration: a conscious lowering of polemics; a willingness
to consider food shipments to the mainland if Peking made a firm request;
an attempt to pour more substance into the Warsaw talks; and finally, a
remarkably bold and conciliatory China policy speech by Assistant
Secretary Roger Hilsman in December, 1963, three weeks after the
President's death. But otherwise little was done to break the stalemate.

Some of the reasons for inaction are instructive and some remain relevant
even now.

First, there was a deep-seated fear within the Democratic Administration
of public, press, and congressional reaction to anything that could
conceivably be denounced as "appeasement" of Communist China; the memories
of the McCarthy-McCarran witch-hunts were still too fresh. In addition,
Peking itself was no help at all: its hostility to Washington seemed to
intensify in the wake of the failure of China's Great Leap Forward.
Furthermore, Washington was painfully lacking in senior China expertise,
men of China background in the upper ranks of the Executive Branch--a
China advocate, a Peking ambassador-in-exile--a China-oriented George
Kennan, Charles Bohlen, or Llewellyn Thompson, who could argue with
authority for a new approach to the mainland.

Another reason was tinged with irony: the Sino-Soviet split and the
U.S.-Soviet rapprochement after the Cuban missile crisis persuaded some
American officials to welcome and embrace Moscow's view of China; at the
very moment that Mr. Dulles' China policy seemed moribund, Khrushchev gave
it a new lease on life. At the very least our Kremlinologists urged
inaction on China lest we rock the boat of Russo-American relations. In
addition, of course, the intensification of the Vietnam War diverted most
Far East expertise to Southeast Asia; China, except as a potential
intervener in the Vietnam War, was largely put aside.

It is disheartening to have to add that a final factor--a paramount
obstacle since 1961
-has been the outlook of the Secretary of State. Normally pragmatic and
dispassionate on most issues, Mr. Rusk has inexplicably clung to views on
Chinese Communism that seem to be those of a zealot. With a remarkable
degree of success, he has single-handedly obstructed recurrent attempts
within the Administration to bring about modification of our rigidity on
China.

Yet despite all these factors, a sea change was nonetheless occurring in
Washington during the Kennedy and Johnson years, gradual shifts beneath
the surface of the bureaucratic monolith. And that sea change began to
show effects at the end of 1965. It is conceivable that the last months of
1965 and the first half of 1966 may prove to have been a significant
turning point in America's China policy.

What are the symptoms of this change?

First, it was in the autumn of 1965 that our UN representative Ambassador
Goldberg, announced America's willingness, however reluctantly and
tentatively to accept Chinese Communist participation in a World
Disarmament Conference.

Second, in December, 1965, the State Department unveiled its first major
modification of the China travel ban since 1957: henceforth, medical
doctors and specialists in public health would be permitted passports for
travel to the mainland. This was done. State explained rather nervously
and pointedly, at the suggestion of that eminent Republican Dr. Paul
Dudley White, President Eisenhower's physician. But Congress remained
silent and the press applauded. By the early spring State was emboldened
to extend the travel modification to virtually every category of citizen
except out-and-out tourists.

Meanwhile, in the first three months of 1966, two congressional committees
performed a service of extraordinary value both to public education and to
foreign policy. Congressman Zablocki and Senator Fulbright each presided
over hearings on China policy, and out of these efforts there emerged not
only a national TV seminar on the China problem but a consensus among the
experts as to what should be done about America's relations with China.

It seems clear that the favorable congressional, press, and public
reaction to the Zablocki and Fulbright hearings gave the Johnson
Administration a fresh new sense of room for maneuver on the China
problem. This sense was confirmed by Harris and Gallup opinion polls in
the late spring that showed a high degree of public tolerance on most
aspects of our relations with China, including the question of UN
membership for Peking. (It was also confirmed by Mr. Steele's attitude
survey, which appeared at this propitious moment.)

The new atmosphere soon produced some surprising changes in the
Administration's rhetoric. In March the Vice President publicly embraced
the policy formulation that had emerged from the Fulbright hearings: Doak
Barnett's concept of "containment without isolation." Even Mr. Rusk's
testimony before the Zablocki subcommittee sounded more conciliatory than
usual.

And in a notable nationally televised speech on July 12, 1966, President
Johnson himself spoke of mainland China as no President had done in
seventeen years. He urged a relationship of "co-operation, not hostility";
he defined the central objective of our China policy as "reconciliation",
he called for the "free flow of ideas and people and goods" in our
relations with the mainland; and he suggested that a "peace of
conciliation" in Asia could only be sustained "through full participation
by all nations in an international community under law." He sounded,
throughout the speech, as if Communist China was here to stay.

This new rhetoric gladdened the hearts of many China-watchers both inside
and outside the government. And it has laid the verbal foundation for a
new approach to China.

But policy change requires action as well as rhetoric. And it was deeply
depressing to many who applauded the progress of 1966 that the
Administration failed to deliver in its first concrete test: a shift to a
"dual representation" strategy in the United Nations General Assembly last
autumn. A "victory" was won on the familiar strategy, though the door was
opened a crack to possible future shifts. Peking was kept out for another
year; but at what short- and long-term price? Within the Administration
the argument last autumn was that "now is not the time." Why? Because
China seemed in convulsion, in a stage of weakness, and perhaps on the
verge of civil war. It is ironic to recall that now was not the time in
previous years because China looked strong, fierce, and confident. The
moral, of course, is that "now" is never the time.

Nor is there any evidence as yet that the State Department intends to act
on the President's clear July reference to a revised trade policy: the
"free flow of goods" in our relations with Communist China. Will timidity
and inertia prevail here as well?

One final question will surely occur to readers: Why move on China while
Vietnam is still aflame?

My own answer is quite simple: Regardless of one's enthusiasm or lack of
it for U.S. policies in Vietnam, China-worriers should be willing
opportunists in adversity. And America's Vietnam posture--our "commitment"
there, our "toughness," our unequivocal resistance to "Communist
aggression"--provides us with a unique opportunity to alter our China
strategy while minimizing two old familiar risks: that of denunciation for
appeasement by right-wing groups at home, and that of denunciation for
betrayal by our more nervous friends in Asia. Furthermore, the continuing
risks of Vietnam miscalculation in Peking and in Washington require urgent
and persistent clarification of our true intentions toward mainland China
by deed as well as word.

So the first steps in Washington's new China approach were fine, and the
rhetoric was full of promise. But will the momentum keep up? Will words be
matched with deeds?

The answers undoubtedly lie with an increasingly informed public, an aware
press, and an emboldened Administration, no easy combination to achieve.

Yet the Council on Foreign Relations' China volumes can be a significant
force in creating such a combination. They come late, to be sure; they
offer a consensus long familiar to the universities; they tell us what
policy-makers should have known and acted upon. But they form,
nonetheless, the basis for a mature Far Eastern policy. To disregard their
prescription would be folly.